At present, receipt printers such as a Point of Sales (POS) printer have been widely used in many fields such as retail, foodservice and medical service. At the same time, more and more users require the printer to provide local configuration functions, i.e. the functions that the users change a certain character locally. Typically, the configuration is a communication interface configuration, e.g. a serial interface baud rate configuration, which is particularly adapted to configure a printer with functions or parameters under the condition that the printer can not be connected with a microcomputer or does not need to be connected with a microcomputer.
A printer with multiple keys or a display module such as a liquid crystal display can implement the configuration functions conveniently and flexibly. However, for reducing the cost, most receipt printers especially the POS printer is provided with a single key without any display module such as a liquid crystal display.
The following method is adopted to implement function configuration of a printer via a single key. As illustrated in FIG. 1, the method includes the steps: pressing a key to power on and printing a printer configuration main menu; and pressing the key to select a sub-menu to perform function parameter configuration of the printer according to a prompt of the configuration main menu. In this way, the function configuration of the printer is implemented. Information of the configuration main menu is illustrated in FIG. 2.
With the method, the function configuration of the printer is implemented via a single key. However, for users that do not need to perform the printer configuration but desire to perform a certain function item such as print self test information, the configuration menu should be printed firstly, and the function item is performed according to the prompt of the configuration menu. Therefore, the operating process is complex and paper-wasting.